@Adam Karminski -

Could you use teams as a third level in the hierarchy (i.e Teams - Projects - Boards) to keep things clean?

Kiron

I'd like to see a Microsoft OneNote style of tabbing created for the boards (along the top and along the sides).

If chat with notification was turned into a first class citizen, this would allow miro to replace slack/flock/twist/hangouts/notion/discord/telegram etc.

I'd also like to see a multidimensional tagging mechanism like gmail. For example, with gmail, you can create your own personalized multi-level hierarchy of labels. Then you can apply any number of labels to each message.  This allows you to build a hierarchy of who, what, when, where, why, and how questions that make it easy to organize any subject. Want to look at all the ideas you had at work in 2018, you have labels on your boards while working on them and you can just filter that information to find those boards easier.

If the boards have tabs and the tabs can also be labeled, this would allow the boards to be sliced using the labels to easily find any topic you wanted.

So, while I like the idea of using folders and having one thing in each folder, I like even more the idea that I can store those things in multiple filing cabinets (by location, by person or by team, by who/what/when/where/how).  You can see a nice video about organization here: https://thesecretweapon.org/. It was something I watched a long time ago with Evernote, but it applies very well to gmail or any other system that was meant for a lifetime of use…

Does that help? Let's go for labels like gmail, rather than directories. People that want to put one thing in each label and use them as folders, can do so, but people that have super complicated projects will be able to put their project into multiple folders (by labeling them and organizing the labels in any fashion they want).

See this other idea about layers/frames: https://community.miro.com/wish-list-32/layers-frames-within-frames-93#post1334

Thank you for your replies!

@Kiron Bondale - well, yeah, but Teams would got mixed between other Miro spaces and managing the access would be a nightmare for me. Also, 3-level structure is better than 2-level structure, but in my opinion is still not enough when managing a product over a longer period of time. :)

@Jason Dinkel - I wouldn’t say directories and tags should be alternatives, but rather complementary solutions. From my experience tags have one big caveat - discoverability. It’s the same principle as with boards in a directory - when the list grows over 7-9 elements, it starts to be a painful experience to browse through it.

Also, tags’ advantage of being flexible is also their weakness. Rigid structure of directories facilitates building a coherent mental model of information within your company. With just tags, I wouldn’t be able to help my employees understand the structure I use to think about our daily operations.

Don’t get me wrong - I still love the idea of tags as a complementary feature, that allows you to map cross-directory connections, build custom “to-do lists” by tagging items etc. I just think these two systems should live together, in a perfect harmony. :)

Anyway, I really hope to see directories in Miro soon!

Hi Adam,

I am totally with you.

I use miro because it fits perfectly to my flexible needs.

I can add whatever I want, connect it like I want and its so customizable.

Why should this userfriendly concept stop when it comes to my usability-needs.

Of course there are zillions of workarounds.

But I use miro because it can develope fast results - so the best is that i have fast usabilty results as well.

Michael

​Hi! Your requests definitely make sense! The team is working on improving user content discoverability.

There are different ways of how people prefer to find the information. I agree that directories and tags may be complementary features.

@Jason Dinkel could you give me an example of how you would organize a tagging system?

@Anton Telitsyn - Great to hear that!

I’ll give you some examples regarding tags. We develop our own e-learning software. We call every major change like a new feature “an initiative”. Most of the initives have a similar structure - one board that works as a dashboard and main documentation, second for design workshops, third for evaluation and retrospective. Sometimes there’re more of theme.

We’d definitely use directories to group boards by products, then subdirectories for initiatives. But using tags, I could quickly explore only Dashboards created for all initiatives.

Another use case is using tags to create “to-do lists” e.g. “Needs review”, “Clean up” or manage boards’ statuses “In progress”, “Feedback”, “Done”.

Thanks @Adam Karminski for the explanation!

@Anton Telitsyn Have a look at the video series https://thesecretweapon.org/

In Gmail, they offer a search and you type *label: whatever” and in addition, the labels are shown down the left of the tool in a hierarchy that you can collapse and expand. Google explains well in their docs: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/118708?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en

Gmail is free. Try it. Labels let you program actions like notifications, forwarding, export to Google Sheets and many other things. They are super discoverable, easy to see in a hierarchy and they can be nested, colored, etc.

@Adam Karminski With a search like google uses in gmail, the labels are very discoverable and since there is a hierarchical organization for each label (who, what, when, etc.) You have a structure to use for finding them. And they can pretend to be directories (since you can choose yourself if you want to put one tag per email). For those that want to put an email into 2018 and Taxes, and Business, they can have the email in all three folders, so to speak. Searching for label:2018 label:taxes and you probably find what you need.

Sound easy?

Nested Folders In Projects

Miro’s great.

But its frustrating organising boards and projects when you can’t nest folders inside each other.

Nested folders to organise projects and boards would be awesome

I’m glad that someone brought the subfolders idea. I just came here to suggest it.

And I also think it is important to have a tree overview of the folders to access and manage them. For me, who works with trainings and consulting, it would be really helpful to keep things organized and store the past projects for further consulting.

Main folder
-- Trainings
---- Company A
---- Company B
------ Training XYZ
-------- Team 1
-------- Team 2

I don’t know if more subfolders would make the develpment more complex, but for sure to be able to have, at least, 5/6 levels of subfolders would help to keep the work organized and easy to access in the future.

I also think tags are great to organize the information, but I don’t believe it can replace the subfolder idea.

I hope you bring these subfolders soon! <3

@Jason Dinkel Everything you say is very true and I’d love to see that in Miro - grouped tags AND directories are basically the definition of a good organisation system.

There’re still some things that I didn’t mention before and still speak in favor of directories + tags:

• Tags work great for you as it’s a personal system and you have access everywhere. Managing permissions per tags would be dreadful and full of unexpected consequences (specifically because they’re so flexible).
• If you try to use tags for all organising purposes, functional grouping gets mixed up with hierarchical grouping and (speaking from my experience) tags would quickly grow into an enourmous list.
• This might be technical, but I’d argue that a network of tag-connected boards might become a performance nightmare.

So in general - I’m still convinced that directories (to express hierachy) + tags (to express function) give a far more versatile and usable experience than tags alone.

@Sergio Great, let’s keep the thread alive! ;)

My intuition for levels is similar to the number of elements per directory - 7-9 should do as after that the “memory chunk” holding the path becomes too big.

@Anton Telitsyn Any news from the product team?

Hi @Adam Karminski !

Tags and a hierarchical structure both make sense, we haven’t made any decisions yet, but yes, let’s continue the discussion and bring new great ideas and examples. Once we have something to test, I’ll definitely get back to all of you for feedback.

Could you elaborate on your experience with tags? How did you use them? Was there an option to create hierarchical tags?

We’re using Miro across our company, and the file management is a real pain. It would be great to have better control over how we view boards and organise them (not in projects - but with proper files). 

Hi, adding into the conversation - I just found this thread after posting this Wish LIst idea. We would really benefit from this also. 

Hi @Zoe Green, could you elaborate on your idea from the wish list? What do you mean by “not in projects - but with proper files”?

@Anton Telitsyn - Thank you for your replies! I see that the issue is gaining traction, I’m really glad you’re looking into this. :)

I think the best examples for the perfect directories + tags experience is Notion. Having a structured list of pages builds a basic structure that is optimised for keeping everything in order and clearly defining boudries of contexts.

But their system allows you to group certain tags and use them kind of separately - one group might be related to function of the file (and have tags like Dashboard, Workshop, Retro etc.) and another group to status (In progress, Needs review, Needs clean-up, Done, Archived etc.).

Grouping tags usually facilitates building shared understanding on how they are connected and improves tags discoverability (which is VERY OFTEN a problem in large knowledge management systems - just look at Jira or Confluence to understand what I mean).

I can’t wait to see new ways to organise boards in your amazing app! I’m sure some of these $50M can be spent on “Marie Kondoing” our projects, which is essential for scaling. ;)

100% agree with this request.  I’m trying to shift us to using Miro more and more over Google Docs and Confluence.  The biggest roadblock to that happening is the lack of a basic folder structure.  

IMO it is best practice to keep the number of boards to a minimum, and use frames to structure things.  That said, permissions quickly complicate that approach, so we still need to be able to organize a growing list of boards across multiple projects, with varying levels of permission.  Thanks!

@Anton Telitsyn - any news? :) 

Hi @Adam Karminski, It is defiantly on our radar, but unfortunately no ETA yet.

Thanks for the info! Can’t wait for the ETA. :) 

@Anton Telitsyn It’s been a while - any news yet? :)

Unfortunately, the same - I can’t share any ETA, as it is quite complicated initiative and we need take into account many different aspects.

There is another tool that I had started using at one point but can’t recall the name as overall I prefer Miro, but it had one feature that was really nice which was basically nested boards/frames. It allowed to keep the different projects more structured by basically having the top level board/frame just be a TOC for the actual content. For example, in development of my video game, I had a frame that was labeled “Characters” and inside that frame was just a link to sub frames for each character. I did the same for Story and had one frame on the top level be “Story” and inside was just a link to sub frames for each chapter. The rest of the features of that tool were lacking a bit so since I’m still in the beginning of these projects I decided to stick with Miro. That level of organization was more of an OCD impulse but I feel as projects get bigger, it would be very useful.

I posted the same comment in https://community.miro.com/wish-list-32/layers-frames-within-frames-93?postid=7885#post7885 as I feel there are at least partially related features.

Thanks @David Watkins for your case!